Apple Puts a Number on Leaving the App Store: 15 Percent

The filing, in plain numbers

Apple submitted its proposal to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has been tasked with setting a reasonable rate. There are three tiers:

• 15 percent for standard apps — the ones that would otherwise pay 30 percent on an in-app purchase.
• 10 percent for apps enrolled in the News Partner Program, the Video Partner Program and the Mini Apps Partner Program, and for subscription renewals.
• 5 percent for Small Business Program apps, meaning developers earning under one million dollars a year through the store.

The mechanism deserves a precise description, because it is easy to misread as a cut to Apple's headline commission. It is not. This is a separate fee that applies when a customer opens an app, taps a link inside it, arrives on the developer's own website and pays there. If a listener taps from the Spotify app through to spotify.com and subscribes, Apple's proposal has Spotify owing Apple 15 percent of a payment Apple never processed, on a page Apple does not host.

Six years of procedure, compressed

The link that makes any of this possible exists because of a 2021 injunction. Epic Games sued Apple in 2020 after pushing a direct-payment option into Fortnite and having the game removed from the App Store. Epic lost on most counts, but Judge Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to stop preventing developers from telling their users about other ways to pay — the practice competition lawyers call anti-steering.

Appeals held the order in suspense for years. When Apple finally implemented it, it attached a commission of 12 to 27 percent. Once a third-party payment processor took its own two to three percent, developers found themselves within a rounding error of where they had started. Epic went back to court. In April 2025 the judge found Apple in contempt and barred it from charging anything at all on link-outs. Since then, an app that sends you to the web has owed Apple nothing.

The Ninth Circuit upheld the contempt finding, but drew a line through it: Apple is entitled to compensation for its intellectual property. It sent the question of how much back down to the district court. That is the proceeding Apple has now had to put a number into.

Zero was genuinely on the table

This filing is not a negotiating position with an obvious floor. It answers a narrow question, and the range of legitimate answers ran down to nothing.

According to MacRumors, the appeals court raised the possibility of limiting the commission to the direct costs of facilitating a link-out — the cost of the tap itself, in effect — and on that basis the fee would be zero. After the filing, Epic said Apple had conceded the point: under the Ninth Circuit's definition of necessary costs, Apple would charge nothing.

Apple's position is that direct cost is the wrong yardstick. Its filing argues that its tools, frameworks and distribution retain value even when the money changes hands elsewhere, and that a zero rate would not reflect it. Apple also told the court that large numbers of US developers, together accounting for most App Store revenue, would be able to link out profitably at the proposed rates. That last point is aimed squarely at what the court has pressed on repeatedly: whether a real alternative to in-app purchase exists in practice, not merely on paper.

The Google comparison, and its weak spot

Apple benchmarks its numbers against competing stores and singles out Google Play, whose link-out rates it gives as 20 percent standard, 15 percent programme and 10 percent subscription. Apple's proposed rates sit below all three, and the filing notes that Epic agreed to Google's.

That comparison is doing heavy lifting, and it is worth reading slowly. A rate a plaintiff accepts while resolving its own case is not the same object as a rate a court has examined and found reasonable. The percentages are commensurable; the legal weight behind them is not. Epic's response will almost certainly turn on that distinction.

What changes on your phone

Nothing this week, and quite possibly nothing this year. No fee exists until the court sets one.

The thing to watch is subscription pricing inside apps. Since April 2025, web checkout links have cost developers nothing, and a number of them added those links precisely for that reason — some passing part of the saving on. A 15 percent fee would put a cost back onto pages that currently carry none. Whether it reaches the customer is a decision each developer makes separately.

There is also a quieter consequence worth understanding before you tap one of those links. A purchase made on a developer's website is not an App Store purchase. It sits outside Apple's refund process, outside Family Sharing and Ask to Buy, and outside the subscription list in Settings where anything bought through the store can be cancelled in three taps. A slightly cheaper subscription is a poor trade if it costs you the cancellation path you actually use. This is the same tension visible elsewhere in Apple's regulatory year: opening the platform reliably improves choice and reliably fragments the guarantees that came with the closed version — as with the iPhone–Windows clipboard sharing Apple agreed to build for the EU.

Two clocks, not synchronised

Epic will now file its response, after which the district court holds proceedings to set the rate. In parallel, Apple's brief to the Supreme Court is due on 14 September, and the justices will hear the contempt question in the term beginning in October.

Apple told the court it still believes rate-setting should wait for that ruling, and that it filed only to comply with the judge's instruction. It had asked repeatedly for a pause; the Supreme Court denied the request on 13 August, which is why the proposal landed that day. If the justices find the Ninth Circuit erred in upholding the contempt finding, the district court's work on the rate could be undone entirely.